This is a diagram of a typical structure within an asset management plan and these ones I’ve lifted out.
So, as a consulting organization, we’ve done asset plans for whole countries. Being in the Pacific islands Tokelau and Niue and we’ve also done one recently for the entire Solomon Island school system. And so, this was the format that we synthesized and used for all those.
So starting at the top you have an Executive Summary, and then an Introduction. The Description of the Service, so that’s “what have we got?” basically.
A high-level overview of what you’re actually managing, the number and type of assets, those types of things.
Then you have your Strategy, Goals, and Objectives. And so that’s set by national, regional policies and plans and things like that and local ones.
Then Demand and Planning for the future.
If you’re in an area where, so there’re 3 scenarios you look at there or three things you run into.
You might be in a very high growth area, so right across Asia, India, Africa, South America for argument sake, even with the bigger Pacific towns, you’ve got massive people coming in from the countryside into the urban area. London, for instance, and the same sort of things in big American cities.
So, they have lots of growth. So the one scenario you’re dealing with a lot of ongoing growth, how do you provide the infrastructure for that?
The other scenario is – it’s just we’re reasonably static. We’ve got a little bit of growth but this is not running any pressure for growth or anything like that.
The third scenario – and this is happening in the middle of the US. It’s happening in the outlying areas of Canada, the Midlands, and smaller towns in the UK and Germany, East Germany particularly.
But Germany and Holland are, and starting to hit here in NZ – it has to do with demographic change and an aging population – but you get the situation where you get massive population decline. The rural areas in Asia and Africa and South America where people are leaving that area.
And so you still have the infrastructure there that needs to be managed but you’ve got declining population, declining youth. You’re going to have declining money, ultimately.
So that’s the hardest scenario to manage.
Growth will bring challenges but managing a reducing population where you still got agricultural mineral production or whatever there or power production, you’re still going to maintain infrastructure but there might be lesser or willingness to pay for it. So those sorts of scenarios.
The other thing that drops into that is can be adaptation and climate change. Though you can deal with that under sustainability, just depending on where you put it. Obviously, technological change and climate change also are going to change future demand.
So in terms of Sustainability, you have a section on that. Just what you’re doing about it. What you’re adapting and changing your infrastructure in terms of that.
You have Life Cycle Management, so all of that information and still feeding into lifecycle management, which is looking at the assets and managing them for their entire lifecycle and renewal.
And again, Risk management. Your processes and practices or how you’re actually managing and what systems and processes you’ve got in place to do that.
And then Implementation, because, asset plans, they are never finished. There are always gaps.
There’s always heaps and heaps of assumptions so this is around how I resolve those and how do I get on and improve the information.
Financial Projections – bearing in mind this is a forecast as asset management plans is a stocktake of existing information and a forward forecast of future.
And then Appendixes. And generally, Appendices you would put detailed asset information and maybe detailed risk information and that sort of stuff there.
[…] thing to remind, and why I’ve got this spiral staircase, is that when I started in 1996, wrote an asset management plan, done, move on to the next thing. And it’s not like […]